“I-don’t-know.” These are three words that most leaders rarely, if ever, dare utter. Why does the admission of “not knowing” feel so uncomfortable? As a client once shared with me, “A failure to know the answer or offer the solution feels like a failure of my leadership. That’s my job!”
I disagree. Always knowing the answer or what to do is not your job as a leader. It’s not your job to know. It’s your job to create the conditions through which smart people do their best thinking. Your job is to convene conversations that generate high quality solutions.
Once you begin to think about the job of leadership as convening you begin to use your time differently. You begin to ask different questions like:
What’s going on here and how can I frame a useful question?
What makes this problem or opportunity important? What’s at stake?
Whose perspective, or expertise do I need to bring into this conversation?
Being a convener means showing up ready to make every meeting a high-impact conversation. You must become what experts like Roger Schwarz refer to as a “facilitative leader.” Here’s what being a facilitative leader (versus a unilateral leader) looks like:
Facilitative Leaders…
Balance advocacy and inquiry
Ask open-ended questions
Invite and reward new thinking
Test assumptions and inferences
See conflict as useful
Take time to build shared commitment
Unilateral Leaders…
Debate and give speeches
Ask leading questions to make a case
Guard status quo or “preferred” thinking
Allow assumptions to be treated as facts
Try to minimize conflict
Look for quick, often tacit agreement
OK, say it out loud — “I don’t know.” When you recast your role from the person with the answers to a facilitative leader these words become an invitation to convene.
In order to become a masterful convener, what do you need to do differently?
Needed to read this today, Larry. Thanks for sharing this insight.
Yessssss!
I find that, in addition to the terrific points above, being comfortable enough and self-aware enough that you know what you know as well as what you don’t, saying the words “I don’t know” is also modeling good leadership for others. My teacher in rabbinical school taught us that “the pursuit of knowledge begins with the phrase ‘I don’t know.'” Rather than that those three words feeling threatening, demeaning, etc., they can be turned around into the beginning of a process of empowerment and self-improvement.
And then I read in another article this quote from James Maxwell:
“Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.”
Spot on Josh. Thanks for contributing to this conversation. I once heard someone describe “chronic certainty” as a “learning disability.” Rings true…
Interesting.
I think that in some cases when a manager “does not know” it is ok and they don’t squirm as it is reasonable for others to assume they don’t know. In other situations when a manager says “I don’t know” to something they should know the answer to… this is when they may squirm.
It’s a good point. We should know the things our job requires us to know. That’s called competence. This blog was more about the dynamic in which people in organizations expect the person with the title to have all the answers — which makes saying “I don’t know” an act of courage. Technical problems can be addressed with factual info that as you say, managers should know. But most challenges in organizations today are less technical and more adaptive. They require multiple disciplines, trade-offs, and close consideration of unanticipated consequences. No one person’s likely to have the answers in these situations. That’s when “I don’t know” becomes an invitation for smart people to gather and discover the power of their collective wisdom.